John Tagg, Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature, Binghamton University, SUNY;

Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths College, University of London

The second, biennial international symposium on visual culture to be held at Bahçeşehir University in the heart of Istanbul invites proposals for contributions from scholars, researchers, critics and practitioners on questions and topics concerning resistance and reinvention.

Aiming to review, reassess and refine accounts of resistance, political and psychic, as they pertain to an understanding of oppressive or repressive normative, dominant or hegemonic forms or formations of power in and across polities and social life, as well as in and across visual culture, we particularly wish to invite contributions which seek to identify relations between resistance and reinvention: resistance to norms of visual culture  of effects or senses of meaning, style, technique, genre, site, space, media, spectatorship, narrative, interacting or producing  that enable, solicit, provoke or otherwise entrain reinvention, in and beyond visual culture.

Resistance involves different agents and senses of agency: groups or individuals; but also psychic agencies drawn into different relations by novel or complex visual, hybrid or multi-media work. Contributions may thus seek to analyze and assess work, objects, uses of media or genre that invoke or provoke socio-political resistance. Retracing resistance to resistance may be part of this in so far as political resistance needs to aim at what preoccupies its field/s of concern, releasing new ways of acting, thinking, feeling or imagining.

Visual cultural objects may also be said to resist: sustaining and promoting the meanings of particular causes, sometimes in complicity with the worst, they may also be understood to generate excessive or subversive senses. Apparent conformity to traditions may harbour the germ of their reinvention. Indeed, traditions and senses of identity may be imagined to necessitate their more or less narrow resistance and reiterating reinvention. Far from being exclusively the activities of minorities, resistance and reinvention may be understood to involve all of us implicated in visual culture today, with enquiries into their operative relations of wide-ranging significance.

The international symposium in visual culture will exclude no type of object made to be viewed, and is not restricted to type of authorship (artist, designer, filmmaker, videographer etc) or sense of disciplinary belonging (history and theory of art, film, photography and/or video, design, media or new media studies, political theory, philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, disability studies etc). Papers that reassess the work of theorists of and for resistance and/or reinvention in relation to particular visual work are encouraged.

Please send abstracts of not more than 300 words for papers of 20 minutes to resistanceandreinvention@gmail.com by 31st July 2013, indicating which of the following possible sessions the paper would likely be suitable for:

Norms and traditions;
Media and genres;
Identities and institutions;
Reinventions of the visual;
Practices and theories of resistance

Please provide your name, title, institutional affiliation (if any), postal and email addresses in a separate section at the head of your proposal. All proposals will be assessed by blind peer review.

We are pleased to respond to enquiries before the deadline above, and we look forward to welcoming you to (or back to) Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, a city of a significant complexity of traditions, and thus of resistance and reinvention.

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